Haiti’s post-quake food security show signs of improvement, which may get even better with the right mix of policy priorities. Although the Caribbean nation remains more food insecure than it was prior to the January 2009 earthquake, it is 13 percent more food secure than it was in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.

In order for Haiti to meet the needs of its 2.5 to 3.3 million people thought to be food insecure, there ought to be a raft of bold nationally-led agricultural policies and projects. Haiti is in a prime position to chart this course due to its central position in the U.S initiated Feed the Future investment plan. This country-led initiative aims to foster food security and agricultural development in a truly endogenous manner. In other words, Haitians, like other Feed the Future countries, will have ownership over the process.

Although Haiti’s agricultural productivity hinges on a myriad of bold policy initiative, in my view, two things top the agenda: 1) The establishment of a national ICT policy with key focus on agriculture; and 2) The decentralization of agricultural management and educational facilities.

Despite demonstrable economic gains worldwide from ICTs in agriculture, Haiti still lacks a national ICT policy. A clear ICT policy will provide a guide for action for multilateral agencies, national action and NGO involvement in the ICT for agriculture sector. Haitian farmers are subjected to ad hoc marketing systems, a wide range of anthropogenic shocks, natural disasters, and limited information to make sound cost-benefit analysis. A solid national ICT policy will provide a basis for Haiti and its transnational donors to tackle these challenges in a coordinated manner—eliminating the well-entrenched culture of duplication.

It is imperative that the state take a lead on this to build its credibility and bring order to a development landscape dominated by NGOs—there is one NGO for every 3, 000 Haitian. Since the 1970s , NGOs have steadily gained a toehold in the country. This is largely because of the perception of endemic corruption within the Haitian government.

While I believe that ICTs ought to be used at all three major stages in the agriculture sector –pre-cultivation, crop cultivation and harvesting, and post harvest— it is most critically needed at the first juncture, pre-cultivation, crop selection, land selection, accessing credit and itemizing when to plant. If given the information for the proper selection of the best crops to plant according to their land type, access to input and generous credit, Haitian farmers will be well positioned to make proper cost-benefit analysis and thrive.

To achieve this, the ICT policy must emphasize the use of GIS and remote sensing. GIS and remote sensing technologies may be used to gather information on soil quality and available water resources. This will aid irrigation strategies in Haiti where water management is poor. Further more, the ubiquitous nature of cellphones in Haiti means that this information may be easily disseminated. Farmers may also be alerted about where to get seeds/other inputs and access credit.

To this end, Haiti ought to decentralize its agricultural framework. Haiti has evaded decentralization proposals for decades, but as the post-quake scenario shows, new life ought to be bred into this initiative with urgency. One third of newborn babies are born underweight. Acute under nutrition among children under five years old is five percent and a third of them suffer from chronic under-nutrition.

The collaborative work being done by the Les Cayes campus of the University of Notre Dame d’Haiti (UNDH), an innovative agronomy school, attests to the importance of decentralization. “The University uses its 40 acre farm as a catalyst for outreach, to assist poor farmers in building sustainable livelihoods, to map and protect biodiversity, and to expand civic participation among the rural poor.” Through these interventions, UNDH seeks to contribute to sustainable development and governance, important factors in rebuilding Haiti after the earthquake.

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The emergence of IBM’s Spoken Web, a mobile innovation that eliminates literacy as a precursor to access the internet, is a game-changer in the ICT for Agriculture sector.

Unlike other efforts to bridge the global information divide, even people with limited to no functional literacy skills will find Spoken Web user-friendly. With nearly 800 million functional illiterates around the world, the inability to read remains a major impediment to the use of ICT4D. This is most acute in the most remote parts of the developing world where livelihoods and agriculture are inextricably linked.

The mobile innovation is essentially a world wide network of VoiceSites joined to make the Spoken Web. Its most essential hardware is a telephone, which people use to browse VoiceSites by saying keywords, also known as VoiLinks.

This rapidly progressing network of voice recordings is predicated on a system called VoiGem, which simplifies the process of creating voice-based applications. VoiGem is unique compared to existing interactive voice response technology because it allows users to create their own VoiceSites that consists of voice pages (VoiceXML files) that may be linked. Each page is identified by the user’s phone number. This identification mode allows the user to easily edit VoiceSites and pages from their phone.

The mobile-centric nature of this development reflects a global trend and complements a development need, particularly for agriculture. Although small scale farmers, scattered across some of the most far-flung places around the globe, make up a large portion of the 5 billion people without access to the internet and computers, a growing number of these people own cellphones. In fact, farmers constitute a strong contingent among the 3 in 4 people worldwide who own mobiles. Although only a fifth of those with mobile subscriptions worldwide have access to mobile broadband services, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) “predicts that within the next five years, more people will hop onto the Web from laptops and mobile gadgets than from desktop computers”.

As more farmers join the growing legion of wired folks, they will have faster and more reliable opportunities to access and share information. This development will reduce information asymmetries, structure and strengthen agricultural markets by bringing the internet to parts of the world where small scale farmers, consumers, middlemen and traders have limited knowledge about where to access and trade food.

The technology is also culturally appropriate given the oral nature of many cultures in the developing world. Farmers will also have the opportunity to efficaciously share valuable indigenous farming retentions.

As with most things, the Spoken Web also comes with challenges. Chief among the challenges is that though voice-recognition technology can match search terms against a previously processed index of recorded voice sites, it presents cumbersome results. However, the technology is being refined to be more precise. Precision is especially important because farmers and other end-users will not be able to retain all the information found on lengthy voice pages/sites, and they may not have the literacy skills to jot down points. Interestingly though, the Spoken Web comes with a fast-forward feature that enables the user to listen as if they were skim-reading.

Despite these challenges, the technology has been successfully piloted in eight Indian villages. It is now a central part of farming and health-care delivery in four Indian states, parts of Thailand and Brazil.

 

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The global movement to improve agriculture and natural resources management through ICT takes center stage this week at the fourth InfoDev Global Forum in Helsinki.

Though in its nascent stage, the forum attracts a wide cross-section of attendees (business incubator managers, policy-makers, SMEs, financiers and development agencies)  from around the globe “for a unique South-South and North-South networking and knowledge-sharing experience”.

The four day forum, which ends on June 3, zeros in on mobile applications for agri-businesses and clean technologies. Yesterday, a  high level panel discussion featuring experts from the World Bank, FAO, AgriCord, Uganda and Kenya examined the varied use of mobile technology in agriculture and the management of natural resources, namely forestry. The discussion was a prelude to the launch of a new virtual resource that the experts believe will function as a “living updatable document”.

The e-Sourcebook “Information and Communication Technologies for Agriculture” will be released in October. The resource will feature a plethora of ICT innovations and examine their potential to improve agricultural development.

This year marks the fourth staging of the bi-annual event, which is functioning within the framework of a joint program with the Government of Finland and Nokia to create sustainable businesses for a knowledge economy. The $17 million program seeks to enhance the competitiveness of the information and communication technologies (ICT) and agribusiness sectors in small and medium sized emerging markets.

A key feature of the two year initiative is the use of mobile technologies to provide content, services and applications for developing countries. This development comes less than a year after global mobile subscriptions topped five billion, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Despite improvement in mobile subscriptions, access to fixed phone lines and internet usage, the ITU says one billion people worldwide still lack connection to any kind of ICT. This is particularly problematic for the drive to improve agriculture as  most  people without access to any form of ICT depend on agriculture to some extent  for their livelihoods.

The Global Forum was last held by Brazil in 2009.

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U.S leadership on global food security will get a major boost for the fiscal year 2011. This follows strong bipartisan support from Congress for a $1.15 billion budget to tackle food security issues around the world. Last week, USAID Administrator Dr. Raj Shah announced that nearly $1 billion will go towards Feed the Future, a global initiative launched by President Obama in 2009 to tackle hunger through sustained and endogenous multi-stakeholder partnerships.

Dr. Raj said, “$90 million will be spent on strengthening our nutrition programming”. Since the world food crisis in 2008, which caused riots in several countries and toppled governments, food security and agriculture grew in prominence on the international agenda.

He says, pending congressional approval, the agency will contribute $100 million to the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a joint multilateral trust fund established in partnership with the World Bank, to address food security and agriculture globally. Since its conception in 2009, the fund attracted nearly $1 billion  from donors, and allocated over $330 million to eight countries.

Conflict, natural disasters and the slow integration of ICT into agricultural policy remains a major impediment to food security and  the improvement of livelihoods. Nearly 2 billion people worldwide are unable to grow or get enough food to eat. Most of those affected by chronic food security problems live in rustic areas, where they have limited information about where to access and trade food, in the least developed countries.

The World Bank has warned that the problem is likely to become even more intractable in the next two decades. According to the Bank’s report, Reengaging in Agricultural Water Management: Challenges and Options, “by 2030 food demand will double as world population increases by an additional two billion people. The increase in food demand will come mostly from developing countries.” The publication says improved food security depends on increased agricultural productivity and improved water management across the developing world.

 

Having observed the negative comments, misreading of and threats issued on the life of my friend and colleague Marc Ramsay recently, I haggled over advancing publicly my comments on Jamaica’s political life. I presume that the risks associated with such in the three decades preceeding the dawn of the new millennium are still with us in this supposedly new political dispensation. After all, a young activist with much to offer, despite his colourful personality and penchant for publicity, was forced to flee this country for safer grounds because he voiced his widely held and well-placed opinion on a subject of national importance.

Unlike these two young men, too many of us neglect our civic duties to the detriment of our society… it smacks of a lack of patriotism and contradicts our romanticized view of our forefathers who sacrificed their own security for the advancement of this nation. I don’t claim to be in their league, but having reflected on that fact, I offer this brief, unsolicited advice to the Prime Minister with lessons for the opposition leader: Sir, you vacillate unnecessarily... This is another low-risk opportunity for you to restore your credibility and renew your people’s sense of hope. In accordance with many of our female journalists, I call on you to nominate a candidate for the April 4, 2011 by-election in South West St Catherine that doesn't disregard due process, the constitution, the hallowed halls of our parliament, the media, the people and in particular our women on International Women's Day. PM Golding, not even people of Warmington's own ilk like him! The man is more dispensable than you think.

Mr. Golding, I’m not ignorant of your party’s parliamentary constraints and the extent to which the pending electoral test exacerbates that, but your legacy is in danger and this is a grand opportunity to salvage a bit of it. Take a principled position; do not subject a nation and its most important elements to the whims of an election cycle. Your chances of losing are limited, even if the opposition awakes from its slumber and nominate an equally respectable candidate.

You and your counterpart’s failure to act accordingly will cement my generation’s lack of faith, trust and interest in politics. A failure to oust Mr. Warmington and hold a COMPETITIVE by-election will typify many of the rationales for some of our unfulfilled expectations and aspirations as a nation. Chief among those reasons is a LACK OF APPRECIATION FOR PRINCIPLES and principled positions with the nation’s interests at heart.